SCREENING THIS WEEK as the first of four documentaries in the
Living Room Theaters’ “Thrive: A Sustainability Film Series,” Earth
Days—a rehashing of the early environmental movement from the
’50s through the first Earth Day in 1970 and the following
decade—isn’t only uninformative. It’s also dangerously
scatterbrained.
In traversing the holiday’s history, director Robert Stone swings
along like a child on monkey bars, as though the only way to advance
the narrative is to hit every single rung—yet he never stops long
enough to fully grasp any of them. You will learn things you already
know (hybrid cars should have come out sooner!) and you’ll be offered
paper-thin explanations as to why (car companies were stuck in their
ways!). Even the treatment of the first Earth Day is full of holes as
to why it was a success.
This lack of focus turns an impressive group of talking
heads—including former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall,
former Congressman Pete McCloskey, and The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich—into environmentalist stereotypes: impotent
idealists, still dwelling on missed opportunities and their roles in
the sea changes that almost were (and the naked gardening that
actually was).
There’s also a wealth of stock footage to back up individual
points—you’ll get to witness everything from mushroom clouds to a
PSA starring the Fonz to, yes, even that Indian-sheds-a-single-tear
commercial.
Next up in the Thrive series, Fuel (starting Oct 30) looks at
our nation’s oil dependence (the New York Times calls the
film “informative,” thank god), and following that, The End of the
Line (Nov 20) makes the argument that overfishing will cause mass
fish extinction by 2048. Finally, narrator Martin Sheen’s soothing
oratorical style should help viewers digest the
affluent-countries-screw-poor-ones message of The End of
Poverty? (Dec 4). Here’s hoping that the rest of Thrive’s films
won’t make me want to smother myself in a pile of leaves.